Targeting the Vulnerable: A Review of the Necessity and Feasibility of Targeting Vulnerable Households

This article examines whether it is possible to target vulnerable households within a geographically defined area. It looks first at the justification for targeting and then reviews recent practical experience in actually trying to reach vulnerable groups. As complex emergencies increasingly last longer, strategies to target vulnerable households are common in the protracted phase of the emergency. While this is often necessary because of a decline in resources, it is not always justified by an improvement in nutritional status or food security of the beneficiary population.
Common target groups are the poor and the malnourished, but in complex emergencies these are not always the most vulnerable. Moreover, recent practical experience has shown considerable difficulties in targeting the poor. Methods to target the poor rely on community-based relief committees, whose priorities are not necessarily the same as those of external agencies. This paper gives examples of such targeted assistance programmes in Kenya, south Sudan and Tanzania. The paper concludes that situations where targeting vulnerable households is justified and feasible are extremely limited. It is suggested that if targeting has to be done because of scarce resources, this should be done on a geographical basis and on the basis of nutritional status. Case-study material shows that it is essential to understand the political determinants of vulnerability and to design methods that will reach the most vulnerable.     

The Economics of Pollution Permit Banking in the Context of Title IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments

This paper presents a model of the collective emission permit banking behavior of electricity-generating units affected by Title IV of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. A rigorous treatment of the constraint that pollution permits cannot be borrowed from future allocations is introduced. This approach enables an analysis of the impact of future changes in electricity demand, regulations, and technologies on the present permit price and emissions level. The effect of uncertainty on the banking behavior is also explored.     

Multi-level discrepancies with sharing data on protected areas: what we have and what we need for the global village

Protected areas present a global heritage. Assessing conservation achievements in protected areas is of crucial importance with respect to the on-time delivery of international biodiversity conservation targets. However, monitoring data from publicly accessible databases for comparative studies of conservation achievements in the protected areas of the world are very scarce, if not non-existent. At first glance this is surprising because, with regards to protected areas, at least according to well established protected area management guidelines and widely accepted public mandates, a great deal of monitoring work and data gathering is to be conducted. This would imply that data on changes of biodiversity in protected areas could be expected to exist, and the constant progress in information technologies and Web tools engenders hope that some of it might even be available online for the global public. This review article presents the results of an extensive online search and review of existing monitoring data from freely accessible online databases for its use in an assessment of conservation achievements in a larger sample of protected areas. Results show two contrary sides to the status quo of accessible data from the World Wide Web for conservation science: data overkill and data scarcity with poor metadata provision. While ever more research is, in fact, based on open-access online data, such as extrapolations of species ranges used in conservation management and planning, it remains almost impossible to obtain a basic set of information for an assessment of conservation achievements within a larger number of protected areas. This awareness has triggered a detailed discussion about the discrepancies in sharing data at the level of protected areas; mismatching relationships between expected activities in protected areas and the capacity for delivering these requirements are certainly among the main challenges. In addition, the fear of data misuse potentially resulting in harm for nature, careers, and competencies still seems to be a critical barrier strictly controlling the willingness to share data. Various initiatives aimed at tackling technical and cultural obstacles are introduced and discussed to reach the goal of a modern resource management based on adaptive management using digital opportunities of the new millennium for a sustainable global village.     

Biogeochemical patterns in a river network along a land use gradient

The Bode catchment (Germany) shows strong land use gradients from forested parts of the National Park (23 % of total land cover) to agricultural (70 %) and urbanised areas (7 %). It is part of the Terrestrial Environmental Observatories of the German Helmholtz association. We performed a biogeochemical analysis of the entire river network. Surface water was sampled at 21 headwaters and at ten downstream sites, before (in early spring) and during the growing season (in late summer). Many parameters showed lower concentrations in headwaters than in downstream reaches, among them nutrients (ammonium, nitrate and phosphorus), dissolved copper and seston dry mass. Nitrate and phosphorus concentrations were positively related to the proportion of agricultural area within the catchment. Punctual anthropogenic loads affected some parameters such as chloride and arsenic. Chlorophyll a concentration and total phosphorus in surface waters were positively related. The concentration of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) was higher in summer than in spring, whereas the molecular size of DOC was lower in summer. The specific UV absorption at 254 nm, indicating the content of humic substances, was higher in headwaters than in downstream reaches and was positively related to the proportion of forest within the catchment. CO₂ oversaturation of the water was higher downstream compared with headwaters and was higher in summer than in spring. It was correlated negatively with oxygen saturation and positively with DOC concentration but negatively with DOC quality (molecular size and humic content). A principle component analysis clearly separated the effects of site (44 %) and season (15 %), demonstrating the strong effect of land use on biogeochemical parameters.     

Competitive kinetics of adsorption onto activated carbon for emerging contaminants with contrasting physicochemical properties

Environmental Science and Pollution Research - Activated carbon (AC) can be used for the removal of emerging contaminants (e.g., drugs) in water and wastewater treatment plants. In the present...     

Using experimental reintroductions to resolve the roles of habitat quality and metapopulation dynamics on patch occupancy in fragmented landscapes

Declines of species in fragmented landscapes can potentially be reversed either by restoring connectivity or restoring local habitat quality. Models fitted to snapshot occupancy data can be used to predict the effectiveness of these actions. However, such inferences can be misleading if the reliability of the habitat and landscape metrics used is unknown. The only way to unambiguously resolve the roles of habitat quality and metapopulation dynamics is to conduct experimental reintroductions to unoccupied patches so that habitat quality can be measured directly from data on vital rates. We, therefore, conducted a 15-year study that involved reintroducing a threatened New Zealand bird to unoccupied forest fragments to obtain reliable data on their habitat quality and reassess initial inferences made by modeling occupancy against habitat and landscape metrics. Although reproductive rates were similar among fragments, subtle differences in adult survival rates resulted in λ (finite rate of increase) estimations of <0.9 for 9 of the 12 fragments that were previously unoccupied. This was the case for only 1 of 14 naturally occupied fragments. This variation in λ largely explained the original occupancy pattern, reversing our original conclusion from occupancy modeling that this occupancy pattern was isolation driven and suggesting that it would be detrimental to increase connectivity without improving local habitat quality. These results illustrate that inferences from snapshot occupancy should be treated with caution and subjected to testing through experimental reintroductions in selected model systems.